New attribute-based authentication and its application in anonymous cloud access service

Secure access control service in cloud computing has attracted much attention recently. Attribute-based signature (ABS for simplicity) is one of important cryptographic notions which can be utilised to realise anonymous authentication and access control in cloud computing. In this paper, we propose an efficient ABS with multiple authorities that can be proved with strong signer privacy and unforgeability. Signer privacy is enhanced due to the anonymous key-issuing protocol used in our scheme, that is, (a) the identity of signer is kept anonymous without revocation among all users whose attributes satisfying the predicate given in the signature; (b) the user can get the attribute private key while preventing the authorities from linking attributes of the user. In addition, our scheme supports batch verification, which greatly improves the verification efficiency.